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Collaboration as an Intangible Asset

Harvard Business Review

Interestingly, intangible assets are all the rage these days on Wall Street. Interestingly, intangible assets are all the rage these days on Wall Street. Most intangible assets are real but invisible, and the most important invisible ability is the ability (or, perhaps better said, the probability) to collaborate.

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What VW Didn’t Understand About Trust

Harvard Business Review

In a strange way, VW’s chicanery only reinforces how important it is for products today to be environmentally safe. Decades ago, a company’s market value was nearly equivalent to its tangible assets—buildings, machinery, materials, financial capital, and so on. What exactly is all that intangible value?

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Do You Know What Your Company’s Data Is Worth?

Harvard Business Review

Data contributes not only to brand equity, but to what constitutes product and service delivery in globally connected and hyper-competitive markets. Using the same formula, Apple’s intangible assets in 2014 were $280 billion — or almost twice the value of its 2015 calculation.

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Why Financial Statements Don’t Work for Digital Companies

Harvard Business Review

In the 2016 book The End of Accounting , NYU Stern Professor Baruch Lev claimed that over the last 100 years or so, financial reports have become less useful in capital market decisions. However, digital companies often have assets that are intangible in nature, and many have ecosystems that extend beyond the company’s boundaries.

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Why Family Businesses Come Roaring out of Recessions

Harvard Business Review

Tobin’s q is the ratio between a company’s market capitalization and the replacement cost of its tangible assets, with a higher ratio indicating that a company has more intangible assets such as patents, brands, leadership etc., Family-owned businesses did not hold back on new product launches during the recessions.

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The Answer to Short-Termism Isn’t Asking Investors to Be Patient

Harvard Business Review

An informed shareholder, who looks beyond earnings numbers and analyzes the company’s intangible assets, would notice that the firm has mortgaged its future. Gathering information on a firm’s intangible assets is costly, and so not worth doing if you own only a tiny bit of stock in a company.

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A Novel Idea for Putting Sidelined Cash to Work

Harvard Business Review

With interest rates at historic lows, market volatility, political uncertainty, the European crisis, severe commodity price fluctuations, and other unpredictable market conditions, corporate brands and executives have been understandably inclined to sit on the sidelines. But history shows that cash cannot sit idle indefinitely.